We spend a lot of time working with our clients to better understand news content consumption over mobile and other connected devices. This article and video present some very interesting research about how the “where” and “when” we consume news affects our choice of subjects and which articles to read. The work day and social connections of the office may already be driving our habits. We all know that context is key for advertising and marketing….This broadens the discussion to all content. Will editorial decisions morph based on these emerging content viewing habits?

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this article and comment on it since last week. As a life-long New Yorker with a business based in NYC, I made the decision to be here long ago. That said, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be (ok, week-long vacation in Jamaica next week looks compelling).

This article makes some good points about the advantages of operating in NYC. Access to the media industry (agencies and content owners) is an unmistakable advantage when trying to bring new media products and services to market. For many start ups and early stage companies, access to these companies and their decision makers is critical to getting traction. All true and certainly valuable, but also fairly obvious.

It’s a great time to be doing business in NYC.

What really makes NYC special is its people and proximity. Innovation springs from ideas. Ideas travel faster in densely populated areas, often gathering steam and refinements along the way. It’s our people, their ideas, their proximity to each other and their proximity to customers that leads to rapid innovation.

I agree that NYC beats Silicon Valley for mobile, but I’m not sure mobile is where it ends. We see young companies thriving in this environment. They feed off the ever-cycling energy of their colleagues, competitors and customers. The incubators, co-working spaces, hotel lobbies and cafes are buzzing with entrepreneurial spirit and activity. If you’re not here then, well, you’re not here. Let us know if we can help.

Nothing new here, but a NYTimes product person offered that quote in the context of dealing with fragmentation on mobile and tablets. Have you tried the NYTimes Chrome “app” (really a web markup)? It looks great in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. On an ipad, it’s an even better experience. Who needs an app? Try it at: http://www.nytimes.com/chrome

Our client, SocialFlow, just announced both their Series A round of funding and an official partnership with Twitter. This is a an exciting milestone for the company and it will enable the team to continue building great products that help ensure success on Twitter and the real-time web.

We’ve been very fortunate to work with the brilliant team at SocialFlow over the last year. The feedback from users has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Not only has SocialFlow created operational efficiencies (saving time and money), its optimization features have provided many clients with an increase of 20-60% in clicks per Tweet and 15-30% in clicks per follower during the first six months of use. Give us a call and we can share more!

Here’s the news in greater detail as it was posted on SocialFlow’s blog:

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A big milestone and our partnership with Twitter

Today represents a big milestone in the history of SocialFlow. We’re delighted to announce that we’ve closed our Series A round of funding and that we’ve also finalized our partnership with Twitter.

This enables us to do many things, but most importantly, it allows us to continue building great products that help our customers increase their engagement and audience growth on Twitter.

Our business is built on the idea that science and data can help people be more successful on the real-time web. We know that we can take the guesswork out publishing the best piece of content at the best time, because we’ve seen the results it can yield (see below). We’re very excited to be able to offer this widely to publishers, retailers and brands in the weeks and months to come.

A brief thank you to our new investors, Softbank, Softbank NY, RRE, AOL Venture Partners, Highline Venture Partners, SV Angels, the angels that joined the round, and of course, betaworks. Thank you for the belief in what we’re doing and the support you’re offering us. Also, to the team at Twitter, particularly Doug Williams and Ryan Sarver for being such champions of what we’re doing. Finally, a huge thank you goes out to our customers. We can’t even begin to express what a pleasure it has been to work each of you and how excited we are to be able to do more.

Here’s the official press release (thanks to @theeconomist and @nypl for lending their voice to the announcement:

SOCIALFLOW ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH TWITTER, SECURES $7 MILLION IN SERIES A FUNDING

NEW YORK—April 7, 2011—SocialFlow, a social media optimization platform, announced today that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The Series A round was led by Softbank, with Softbank NY, RRE, Betaworks, Highline Venture Partners, AOL Venture Partners, SV Angel and a group of high profile angel investors participating.

SocialFlow will use the funding to accelerate the development of its publishing platform, which determines in real time the Twitter topics that people are engaged in and how likely they are to take an action on a Tweet. The platform then publishes the best Tweet when audiences are most receptive. SocialFlow has also finalized a partnership with Twitter to use Twitter’s firehose data for analytics within the SocialFlow platform.

SocialFlow clients experience an average increase of 20-60% in clicks per Tweet and 15-30% in clicks per follower during the first six months of use. SocialFlow’s current client base spans a wide range of industries and includes some of the world’s largest media companies and well-recognized brands, such as The Economist, eMusic and the New York Public Library.

SocialFlow’s technology removes the guesswork involved in determining what and when to Tweet by analyzing the real-time resonance and receptivity by topic of a given audience, as well as the propensity of an audience to engage in real time. SocialFlow selects and automatically sends the Tweet that audiences will find most useful, interesting and relevant, resulting in greater clicks on links, Retweets, mentions and followers.

“Earning engagement and building large audiences on Twitter is dependent on whether people value the content that you offer,” said Frank Speiser, co-founder of SocialFlow. “Our goal is to help customers ensure that their Tweets are earning the highest possible engagement. With more than 150 million Tweets streaming through Twitter each day, determining the right Tweet to send when people are most interested and ready to engage is a problem that can and should be solved algorithmically. It only makes sense to address your audience when they will care, and those windows in which they care are both fluid and short.”

“The global adoption of Twitter and other social media is driving publishers, brands and retailers to join the conversation,” said Jordan Levy, partner at Softbank. “We are thrilled to support SocialFlow’s unique platform, which monitors the collective consumer pulse in real-time and delivers actionable feedback at scale.”

In the case of The Economist (@theeconomist), clicks per tweet increased by 150% and clicks per follower increased by 50% after eleven months. In addition, followers increased approximately three-fold and overall referrals from Tweets increased by four-fold.

“SocialFlow is an instrumental part of our efforts to grow an audience on Twitter and drive engagement with our content,” said Dave Humber, manager of audience development, The Economist. “The logic and science behind SocialFlow’s approach was very appealing from a performance perspective, but also as a way that enables us to scale our operations with a relatively small team.”

With an increasing presence on Twitter, the New York Public Library (@nypl), the largest library system in the world, has seen great success with using SocialFlow to increase engagement with its patrons.

“SocialFlow enables NYPL to curate the most relevant posts from its wealth of blog content at a frequency and consistency that would not be possible with Tweets generated by staff,” said Susan Halligan, director of marketing, New York Public Library. “The results speak for themselves: Unique blog pageviews have increased by 30% in Q1/2011 over Q1/2010 and the number of clicks and Retweets per Tweet sent through SocialFlow is consistently higher than our manually scheduled Tweets.”

SocialFlow is available as a hosted application to media companies, retailers and brands. The application offers optimized publishing, insight and analytics to help inform editorial and marketing programming, and tools to optimize engagement with followers. The company’s API is available to developers seeking to integrate SocialFlow’s optimized publishing functionality into publishing platforms and content management systems (http://developer.socialflow.com).

About SocialFlow

Launched in June 2010, SocialFlow (http://www.socialflow.com) is a social media optimization platform that is used by media companies, retailers and brands to earn greater engagement, clicks, re-tweets, mentions and followers on Twitter. SocialFlow’s software ensures that you enter conversations at the right time so that your messages are well received. A betaworks company, SocialFlow is based in New York City.